In August 2005, the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium was to be the last for Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, set to retire in January 2006. This was the occasion to pay homage to the luminary whose 15-year career spanned the ideological divide between Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke.
Raghuram G. Rajan, the precocious chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, was asked to present a paper on how the financial sector had evolved under Greenspan’s tutelage. Rajan was aware of the solemnity of the occasion and knew that others would be breathless in their praise of securitization, deregulation, the emergent concept known as the “Greenspan put,” and other tools of financial creativity and exposition that were spawned during the maestro’s reign.
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